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A follow-up interview by the same author with Sam Harris on the techniques of unarmed combat against armed attackers:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/what-mar...

This:

Most martial artists have done knife-defense drills where their partners attack in a very stereotyped way--lunging forward with a single thrust and leaving their arm out there so that you can perform the technique. This is just a pantomime of combat, and it is dangerously misleading.

This was why I found traditional martial arts like karate to be daft. They only seemed to teach you defence against someone else who punches like a karateka.

Any decent martial art will take pains point out the difference between art and science though. I practice kenpo for instance and my sensei is crystal clear about how stupid it would be to use anything in a kata in real life.

It's more to build muscle memory, self awareness of the body and a knowledge of the mechanics of combat. For the most part, I think traditional martial arts can be seen as a form of dance. It's not something to be applied as much as interpreted. Many of these disciplines were used to train actual soldiers, warriors, and peasants after all. I think their real value comes in not taking them at face value though.

Obviously ymmv in regards to any particular art.

Your sensei has common sense. A lot of them don't. Years ago, one of my college philosophy professors brought in her sensei to give the class a demonstration in kung fu. At one point he lightly pinched his opponent (a fellow black belt) on the chest, and the man collapsed to the ground in agony.

"Pressure points are very real," said the sensei. "Anyone who doesn't believe it can come up for a demonstration afterwards." The class laughed nervously. Afterwards I approached him and said I was skeptical, and asked if he could demonstrate on me while I stood there and did nothing. The class gathered around us in a circle. I really thought he'd make a believer out of me, and just hoped I could refrain from peeing myself in front of everyone.

It was all bullshit. No matter which nerves he tried to poke or prod, it just wasn't that painful. He then tried to deflect attention from his failure by showing some cool way he could put me in an arm lock, which would only work as long as I didn't jerk my arm away while he was doing it. I think he honestly believed that he was a lethal killing machine. The problem with idiots like him is they tend to convince too many students that they're actually learning self-defense.

Nerve strikes sometimes work and sometimes don't, which is an annoying detail martial artists seem rarely to mention. There is some science to some of it, buried deep deep under the mysticism and bs. Unfortunately, people expect "five palm exploding heart" when the best they can hope for is probably "make someone's arm go numb if you're lucky and they're arranged right." Arm locks are the same way... they can work on the right person for like a second or two (i've been the dummy for that) but after that you're supposed to do something. Put the cuffs on them or step on their neck or break their arm or something.

Punching them in the throat always works though.

Arm locks can work for much more than "a second or two." Watch Brazilian jiu jitsu, submission grappling, or even MMA competitions. But, in order to maintain the control of an arm lock, you often have to go to the ground. When standing, people have too much freedom of movement.

I was at the rules meeting for an amateur MMA competition one time. (Someone I trained with was fighting, not me.) Someone asked if pressure points were legal, and the entire room rolled their eyes. The official paused for a second and said, yes, you can use "pressure points."

I don't remember what happened to that fighter, but I know he didn't win through pressure points.

> They only seemed to teach you defence against someone else who punches like a karateka.

Good thing the lower-level students show very little technique during sparring.

I was listening to Robson Moura (BJJ black belt) talk about why he loves the art so much. He said something like: when you walk out of a karate class, after a lot of sparring, you feel like a tough-guy who's ready to kick some ass, but when you walk out of a BJJ class, where people smaller than you have just repeatedly demonstrated that they could kill you with their bare hands, you feel very humbled.

The effects on ego tend to weed out a lot of assholes, and between this and the mental challenges of the sport, it is one of the reasons I've come to love it. (Ryron & Rener also do a pretty good job of distinguishing between self-defense and sport jiu jitsu, at least in the videos I've seen from them.)

I'm not familiar with the full range of Harris' writings, but I found it interesting that as an explicit and unapologetic 'atheist', Harris actually says at one point:

  ...we don't know what happens after death.

It is in the context of discussing death with a child, but still... the hardcore atheist position would seem to be that we do know what happens: nothing, the total cessation of experience. To say "we don't know" seems to allow for some tiny shred of religious mystery, which I didn't expect from Harris.

the hardcore atheist position would seem to be that we do know what happens: nothing, the total cessation of experience.

Why do you think so?

To be firmly and insistently ('hardcore') atheist suggests to me ruling out the idea that there is anything diety-like, because there is no good evidence for it. The question of experience after death seems to me very similar to the question of the existence of dieties. The fact that beliefs about dieties and about the afterlife are usually linked in the same belief structure increases my confidence that the two subjects are often reasoned about the same way.

I would therefore expect someone who thinks, after considering all evidence (or the lack thereof), that there are no dieties to also believe, based on similar evidence (or lack thereof) that there is no experience after death. Harris has not (as far as I know) said that "we don't know" if there are dieties.

Indeed, here's an old interview where Harris criticizes agnosticism as "not an intellectually honest position":

http://web.archive.org/web/20100313075830/http://www.truthdi...

> To be firmly and insistently ('hardcore') atheist suggests to me ruling out the idea that there is anything diety-like, because there is no good evidence for it.

This assumes that a hardcore atheist must arrive at that position by being a hardcore positivist/empiricist. This is an unwarranted assumption.

He's been saying things like this for years, mostly because we don't know enough about consciousness yet and that he spent too many years hanging out with Buddhists.

Your "hardcore" atheism is more correctly known as gnostic atheism. You will be hard pressed to find philosophically educated gnostic atheists.

Can you elaborate? What sort of things would a philosophically educated person know that is so convincing? I'm genuinely curious.

The fact that in all of the history of philosophy nobody has provided a firm argument that the existence of a god is impossible?

There are plenty of kids on the internet who claim gnostic atheism with their "proofs" which usually involve various simple paradoxes that have been resolved by more serious philosophers plenty of times.

By your question, it seems like you may have misinterpreted what I said.

The phrase "gnostic atheism" does not have a Wikipedia article (or even be referenced in other articles), so can you be more clear about what you mean?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gnostic (specifically definition 2)

http://actok.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Agnostic+v+Gnost...

Using the label "agnostic" as a philosophical weasel word to give a nod to solipsism every time it is politically convenient is a form of lopsided pedantry. Unless you think a specific religious god is more likely to be real than, say, vampires or Harry Potter, the distinction does not actually add any useful information. People normally just use "agnostic" as a device to try to frame a debate in a precise way in order to put the burden of proof squarely on the positive claim.

I used the word "gnostic", not "agnostic".

I'm not sure you understand what I said. Let me explicitly state what I tried to imply about your use of the word "gnostic": people who call themselves gnostic atheists are not generally being philosophically ignorant or dishonest.

I just didn't see how your comment applied. I never said that gnostic atheists were philosophically ignorant or dishonest. I just said that they would be harder to find.

Okay. I took your statement "You will be hard pressed to find philosophically educated gnostic atheists" to imply that most people who go by that label are likely not philosophically educated, presumably because realizing that true certainty about anything is impossible invalidates the "gnostic" part. If that's not what you meant, then I apologize. I often see this line of thinking, so I patterned matched incorrectly.

No worries. In my experience, the majority of gnostic atheists are like some of the kids on /r/atheism. There exist educated gnostic atheists, but in my experience, they are more rare than educated agnostic atheists.

The only requirement to be an atheist is to not believe in a deity. There's no such thing as a "hardcore atheist", because there's no central dogma to be hardcore about. Many atheists do follow some sort of non-theistic belief system, such as Buddhism or Daoism.

You're thinking of the people who are what I'd call "anti-theistic", that is, explicitly opposed to the concept of deities, religion, or mysticism in general.

I'd fall under your definition of 'anti-theistic' and I'm still not entirely sure what happens after death. I'm perfectly happy not knowing though.

OK, then, I thought of Sam Harris as being 'anti-theistic'. (That was the idea I was shooting for with the term 'hardcore atheist' -- being not just doubtful but actively opposed to the idea of dieties/creators.) His book is after all titled The End of Faith.

Allowing for the idea that anything interesting might happen to consciousness after death strikes me as atypical for anti-theistics.

"I thought of Sam Harris as being 'anti-theistic'"

There are gnostic/agnostic atheists.

Atheism is a disbelief in god(s) and doesn't say anything about life after death. To the extent that an atheist might take an evidence based approach to belief they may also disbelieve in life after death. Given what we know about consciousness and brain function it's not unreasonable to say that we know there is no life after death because there is no known mechanism for it. ie - no brain, no electrical activity, no sense of self. That the belief in life after death remains so prevalent indicates a prodigious ability for wishful thinking.

Indeed, but here is a person (Harris) who avowedly disbelieves in god(s) but says "we don't know what happens after death", which seems to allow for something happening. That same sort of fuzzy allowing-for-possibilities, if applied to the question of god(s), would yield something other than what I understand Harris's position to be.

As what I suppose you might call a "hardcore theist", I see no inherent contradiction between the most severe form of atheism (the firm and unquestioned belief that there is no deity) and any particular belief or lack of belief (or belief in knowledge or lack of knowledge) concerning what humans experience after physiscal death.

Sure, lots of atheists come to atheism through (at least, in their own description) a form of empirical positivism where rejection of anything that is not a necessary explanation for observed physical phenomena is sort of the default belief position, which would put life after death in the same category of disbelief as deities, but just because that's a common aspect or justification of atheism doesn't mean that it is intrinsically linked to atheism.

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